Artist Statement 

"To grasp and pull while twisting, pinching, spreading, crushing and massaging. Clenching the very innards of an object. Knowing full well that by ripping out what was once there and replacing it with a foreign object may cause it despair. Yet it heals and becomes something more beautiful that I could ever imagine. To challenge myself to see if I could nurture foreign ideas, people, customs, traditions, taboos into my own life is an everlasting challenge. Can I be compassionate enough to try and understand? To rework my prejudices and thoughts of what life “should be?” To be open enough to let new ideas flow, letting them shape to whatever form it may be. Perhaps resulting in something more beautiful than I could have ever imagined. Ripping, pulling, spreading, shoving, crushing and massaging through, creating scars of past memories and growth."

 

All pieces are created through a seasonal sustainable harvest or through waste streams on numerous permaculture/ farm sites throughout the world.

 

***Each piece is handwoven and unique***

​

​

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

​

I cannot imagine my life without cycles, without nature, without the ups and downs and in between moments of my life. My investigation into natural dyes and cellulose fiber came out of a need to stay healthy while exercising my voice through a visceral movement in connection through art. My hands stay busy while my mind thinks, and eventually slows down. I have been focusing on site-specific materials that create a certain relationship between myself and the land and its people. In Namibia, I was a foreigner, in the US, a local, but coming from an immigrant Ukrainian and German ancestry. I'm considered a local, but on occupied territory. What do these labels do to my perception of belonging, of my understanding of a sense of place and idea of home? How do I fit in this larger puzzle of life with an ancestral history of immigration, rape, colonized, colonizer, whiteness, middle class, lower class, nature-lover, hippie, consumer, capitalist, socialist, eco-conscious, climate change, back to the land, woman, white, wanderer?   

This work is in an attempt to process through these living moments.